Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

3. The Mother and the Practice of the Integral Yoga

Fragment ID: 19249

In the case of X, I was under the impression that Mother could at once know of such things. Some even say that she knows everything – all that is material or spiritual.

Good Lord! you don’t expect her mind to be a factual encyclopaedia of all that is happening on all the planes and in all the universes? Or even on this earth – e.g. what Lloyd George had for dinner yesterday?

Others maintain that she knows when the question of consciousness is involved...

Questions of consciousness of course she always knows even with her outermost physical mind. Material facts she can know but is not bound to do it. The matter however is too complex for answer in a short space.

but as for material details, she does not know.

What would be true to say, is that she can know if she concentrates or if her attention is called to it and she decides to know. I often know from her what has happened before it is reported by anyone. But she does not care to do that on a general scale.

But if she does not know, what is the meaning of your message: “Always behave as if the Mother was looking at you; because she is, indeed, always present”?

It is the emanation of the Mother that is with each sadhak all the time. In former days when she was spending the night in a trance actively working in the Asram, she brought back with her the knowledge of all that was happening to everybody. Nowadays she has no time for that.

This question of Mother’s knowledge became even more interesting for me today. She gave me the flower signifying “Discipline”. I began to wonder why this particular flower was given; then I remembered that yesterday I had not observed the right discipline by taking a little hot khichari with Y and Z.

In this respect the Mother is guided by her intuitions which tell her which flower is needed at the moment or helpful. Sometimes it is accompanied by a perception of a particular state of consciousness, sometimes by that of a material fact; but only the bare fact, usually – e.g. it would not specify that it was hot khichari that was cooked or how Y or Z came in. Not that that is impossible, but it is unnecessary and does not happen unless needed.

Anyway, please tell me how far Mother and you know about our physical, material affairs.

In this case it was a general hint with no special reference to khichari.

16 July 1935